Thursday Bytes: Transbeam, CityFibre, AT&T, MEF

Here's a quick rundown of some news items for this Thursday, including two expansions, one federal deal, and a rebranding to take note of.

My own home turf in central and southern New Jersey has some new bandwidth options this week. The managed services provider Transbeam is expanding its fiber reach into LATA 222. They'll now be able to serve businesses in metros like Princeton, Trenton, Camden, and Cherry Hill, filling in a gap between their existing presence in northern New Jersey and Philadelphia. Perhaps they'll do the same thing to the northeast next, and take on Connecticut?

CityFibre is expanding its UK footprint again with another Gigabit City. They are planning to take an existing 82km fiber network in Bristol that they recently acquired in the KCOM network acquisition and build off of it. Triangle Networks will be their local partner, with a target of 100 new customers on the network by the end of 2016. There are more such former KCOM assets that CityFibre may do this with of course, it should be an interesting and busy year for them.

AT&T has picked up a federal cloud deal with its own regulator. Under a 5 year agreement, AT&T will be helping the FCC leverage cloud technologies, changing its network needs on demand as it connects to diverse cloud service providers. I used to give the FCC some flak about their website and such, but they do seem to finally be moving into the 21st century with their infrastructure.

And the MEF is doing some rebranding. Next November, you won't be attending GEN16 but rather MEF16, reflecting the expansion of the group's focus beyond simply Ethernet. With the Third Network initiative, the conversation is about not just Carrier Ethernet but also Lifecycle Service Orchestration, Software Defined Networking, and Network Functions Virtualization and all one needs to do to make them work well together.